Thursday 3 June 2004 05.04 EDT
First published on Thursday 3 June 2004 05.04 EDT

Ian Watmore does not take up his post as the government's chief information officer until September, but he has already spent at least one day at his new office. He didn't need to ask directions. As managing director of Accenture UK, one of the government's biggest IT contractors, he knows Whitehall.

Watmore, 45, was named last week as Britain's first head of e-government. The Cabinet Office created the post to replace that of e-envoy, the official responsible for chivvying Britain to use the internet. His job involves planning the government's IT programme, ensuring the security of information systems and heading the IT profession in government.

Watmore's salary will be in a band ranging from £90,867 to £192,424. But even the top of this range would be a substantial cut from his managing director's pay packet.

Watmore's new fiefdom is the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit, formally created yesterday from the rump of the Office of the e-Envoy, less some functions that are transferring to the Treasury's Office of Government Commerce. Douglas Alexander, the Cabinet Office minister responsible, says the change "represents a development from the original e-envoy's task of getting the UK online, to ensuring that the government capitalises on the potential of ICT to both transform service delivery and achieve a step change in operational efficiency across the public sector".

The current e-envoy, Andrew Pinder, 57, was due to leave in April but will run the new office until September.

Government is a big source of business to Accenture, known as Andersen Consulting before an acrimonious divorce from the Andersen accountancy partnership. Last year, it won two NHS contracts adding up to £2.033bn, making it the health service's largest IT contractor after BT. It will be responsible for installing electronic health records in the east and northeast of England. The firm is also a big player in e-democracy: its subsidiary Accenture e-Democracy Services last year helped run one of the world's largest experiments in e-voting, in the local elections in Sheffield.

However, the company doesn't always get its way. Last December, it unexpectedly failed in a bid to renew its largest contract with central government when the Inland Revenue picked rivals Cap Gemini and Fujitsu for the £3bn Aspire contract to run tax systems.

Accenture had been responsible for systems handling national insurance contributions under a giant contract dating from 1995. That system, NIRS2 (national insurance recording system), was briefly notorious as an example of government incompetence in IT projects. In 1999, Watmore was quizzed by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee about delays to the project, which he ran for four years. His cool performance in front of the committee, and his record in steering NIRS2 through the controversy, will have been noted by his new civil service boss, Cabinet Secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull.

Watmore has also been responsible for major IT systems at the Stock Exchange and the supermarket firm J Sainsbury.

The IT industry welcomed his appointment as a sign that government is getting a grip on the management of large IT projects. "It's always useful to have one of our own at the top," said Nick Kalisperas of the IT suppli ers' association Intellect. "There are a lot of big projects going on and we need to have an overall vision."

Local authorities, which run most e-government services, are more cautious about the idea of an IT tsar. Christ Guest, president of SocITM, the IT managers' association, says he is "looking forward to an early meeting" with Watmore. Guest is likely to press central government to remove legal barriers to local e-services and to provide more central government support, but not to tread on local authorities' toes. As one of Watmore's duties is to find ways of creating single channels of e-services through different tiers of government, there could be conflict in store.

Watmore's priority is likely to be ensuring that government meets its target of making all services available electronically by the end of 2005 (the present figure is 71%) and persuading people to use them. He is also likely to be involved in the planning and procurement of the ID card.

Beyond that, a clue to his thinking appears in Accenture's latest global survey of e-government, published in April. It exhorts countries with mature e-government programmes to "adopt a whole-of-government approach, building on strong governance and cross-agency collaboration. Their aim should be to establish seamless integration across all levels of government".

On Britain, the report notes: "Upcoming changes in leadership and organisation, expected enhancements of a customer-focused citizen portal, and additional planned initiatives focused on driving internet awareness and usage among the population should make the UK one of the most interesting e-government programs to watch over the next 12 months."